Shanghai Book Swap #2

by John Pasden

23 Nov 2005

The first one was a success, so here we go again. The second Shanghai Book Swap happens this Saturday. Be there!

I have to admit, I haven’t had time to read the handful of books I got at the first book swap. I’ve got my hands full with work and school, so occasionally taking in pieces of Asimov’s Foundation series is about all the non-school-related reading I’ve been doing lately, aside from browsing God’s Debris. But it is the will of the People that the next swap be this month. So be it. I’ll be there, feverishly swapping books I haven’t even read yet…

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Comments

Sounds like fun. I remember living abroad and, not having anything better to do, read a lot of books I would NEVER have read stateside. Pompous novels like Paul Auster’s Leviathan and that book by Jon Krakauer about that retard who starved in the forest. I remember reading Memoirs of Geisha in Nanjing of all places. I wonder if that book’s popular in China, both among the Chinese and laowais. It’s a good novel but rather overrated.

Why not? Chick books are very cool. In fact, I wrote my MA thesis on The Bridges of Madison County. (And no, that’s no joke.) I’ve been analyzing bestselling novels for five years now, and they’re often chick books like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Horse Whisperer. My criteria for reading fiction: if it made the author a ton of money, I’m going to read it, be it The Da Vinci Code or The Notebook!